The Haitian Revolution by Eduardo Gr&üner

Author:Eduardo Gr&üner [Grüner, Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2019-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

In other words, the colonial revolution – and the revolution in Saint-Domingue in particular – was internal to the French Revolution, just as the latter was internal to the Haitian Revolution. Both were poles of one and the same contradiction: a contradiction that constituted them and that made each, dialectically, a component of the other. In order to understand the concrete totality of this complex process, it is necessary to keep what we might call the Haitian-ness of the French Revolution in mind, as well as the French-ness of the Haitian Revolution.

From another point of view, however – more specifically, when we consider its social base, although of course this category alone cannot suffice to characterize the nature of any revolution – it is tempting to characterize the Haitian Revolution as “proto-” or “para-socialist.” It was, after all, effectively the most oppressed classes of society who made up not only the revolution’s masses but also its leadership. The same cannot be said of other revolutions for independence or bourgeois revolutions. Still, however, at no time did the revolutionaries demand a socialization of the means of production (in this case, fundamentally arable land). Their demand was instead for what today we would call “agrarian reform,” a more equitable redistribution of land that would expand access to it. Nor was this always or consistently the case. As I have said, at first, after the French plantations were confiscated, Toussaint sought to establish a sort of “state despotism” that would force former slaves to continue to work on the land under a regime that would have been no less harsh than the old one that had been overthrown, only in exchange for higher wages (a difference that of course was not negligible). This would have been a sort of “Stalinism” or a modern form of what Marx called “Asiatic despotism,” which can be found in the political history of the great empires in Africa as well as among pre-Columbian cultures. It would have entailed the centralization of state property and reliance on semi-forced labor. This, predictably, failed, because the former slaves were not willing to agree to such a modest change in their everyday lives, even with their liberty guaranteed. Strictly speaking, what Toussaint envisioned would have been a mixed state despotism: during the transition, under Toussaint, many of the old planters who had not fled or been executed were invited to take charge of their plantations again, though under state supervision, since the reconstruction of destroyed plantations was unavoidable, no matter what regime of property was decided on. Such a reconstruction was an indispensable precondition for restoring the trade in sugar, far and away the most important source of wealth on the island. The former slaves and commandeurs often lacked the necessary technical knowledge; this was another challenge that Toussaint’s proposals sought to address.

Finally, the Haitian Revolution was, or became, an “anticolonial” revolution whose social basis and leadership were both of the most “popular” kind imaginable, as we have just seen. In

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